Jonathan Hardwick

Improving the performance of Visual Studio

One of our main roles in DevDiv Performance Engineering is to help other teams with performance investigations – that is, to help them understand why their code isn’t running fast enough. Recently we ran a little side project that was unusual in two respects: first, we were analyzing performance just for our own curiosity, and...

Of all my blog posts, the one that generates the most reliable stream of comments is “User comments about offline files”. All my other blog topics get mild interest, but what people really, REALLY want to know is how to get offline files working again when it stops. I just can’t argue with the numbers...

With the release of SCCP 2007 I've now been through two complete product cycles of what started out as a little research project called "Indy" -- and that seems like more than enough! So I've moved over to the Performance Engineering team in Microsoft's Developer Division. The division's flagship product is Visual Studio, and our...

Ironically I'm almost the last to blog it, but the SCCP team is really happy to announce the release of System Center Capacity Planner 2007. You can get it now, it's totally free, and it'll help you size deployments for Exchange Server 2007. But wait! There's more. The fabulous Solutions Accelerator team have released plug-in...

It's common to use "funny characters" (i.e., non-alphabetic symbols) in Outlook folder names, so that the folders sort in a specific order: !!Super Important!ImportantAll A'sBasically B's... Of course, the same principle can be applied to category names: !Important@Home@WorkProject AProject B... But how can you be sure that "!Important" will come before "@Home"? In other words,...

We're pleased to announce the beta release of System Center Capacity Planner 2007! SCCP 2007 provides sizing, architectural guidance and best practices for customers to plan their deployments of Operations Manager 2007 and Exchange 2007. Essentially, it can predict how much hardware you'll need for a deployment, and how that hardware will behave once one...

Lazy-blogging (verb): The act of letting a thought sit unblogged for long enough that someone else blogs about it instead, thereby saving you the effort. cf lazyweb. Case-in-point: Many of us OCD types find it impossible to sit with a non-empty recycle bin on our desktop. We just can't do it. It nags at our...

My apologies if you're seeing any of my old posts reappear as if freshly published. Comment spam has gotten so bad on some posts that I'm resorting to disabling comments completely. I think this triggers a republish by Community Server (at least, I have to click the "Publish" button), which some blog readers will then...

Or, "What is all this stuff doing on my computer", part II. I've just finished switching my portable life over to a new Toshiba M400 Tablet PC. Gig of memory, Centrino Core Duo, life is good. At least, it was good until I looked at the process list in task manager. Then it was that...

We’ve had these bits bouncing around for way too long, but now they’re finally linked to from the SCCP home page. So revel in the glossiness of An Introduction to Microsoft System Center Capacity Planner 2006 🙂